


Cursed Bloodlines and Open Hearts

by Dr_Roslin



Series: Broken Legacies and Hopeful Futures [3]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Deviates From Canon, F/M, HEA, HEA for days, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Torture, Kidnapping, No pregancy, Rey Palpatine, Reylo Children, Safe to Read if Triggered by Pregnancy, Sith Rey (Star Wars), Smuggler Ben Solo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-10
Updated: 2021-01-10
Packaged: 2021-03-13 23:55:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28662072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dr_Roslin/pseuds/Dr_Roslin
Summary: Leia watches this young woman - tall and younger than she should be, even as she bows her head deferentially and answers with a soft murmur of ‘yes, grandfather’ as she walks towards Ben, still on his knees - and forgets to breathe.----Determined to protect her family, Leia Organa left the world of Republican politics and Jedi machinations far behind. As the First Order grew in power, though, and with her grown son, Ben, missing, she threw herself once more into the fray.With peace restored to the galaxy, she's once again determined to defend her family -  each and every last one of them - from all comers.
Relationships: Chewbacca & Leia Organa & Ben Solo & Han Solo, Leia Organa/Han Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Series: Broken Legacies and Hopeful Futures [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2092818
Comments: 13
Kudos: 43





	Cursed Bloodlines and Open Hearts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reylo_addict](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reylo_addict/gifts), [JadedWarrior](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JadedWarrior/gifts), [myTBRisgrowing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/myTBRisgrowing/gifts).



> After I wrote 'Broken Legacies and Hopeful Futures,' I had in mind writing a reylo sequel. It turns out inspiration struck faster than I anticipated. 
> 
> As we say; if we have to have Rey Palpatine, make it hurt. And then make it heal. 
> 
> For @reyloaddict, @jadedwarrior5 and @mytbrisgrowing in thanks for all the encouragement.

‘So what you are telling me is that, somehow, Palpatine returned? But that he's definitely gone, now?’

Leia manages not to shift in her seat, sighing. She's exhausted and wants nothing more than to rejoin her family.

She steels herself instead for what will likely be a long afternoon.

Poe Dameron may still be one of the best pilots in the Resistance fleet, but as always, he lacked the ability to appreciate nuance.

‘Senator, Palpatine is dead. No matter how he managed to survive all those years before his reappearance-’

_\- and details on this are sketchy -_

Dameron has also never got over the habit of interrupting her.

‘-despite the story your brother has told all these years,-’

She ignores the interruption, soldiering on.

‘-Palpatine is most definitely dead now. As are all the clones that he had stored for his personal use.’

‘I haven’t lost my ability to understand Basic, G _eneral Organa;_ what I’m saying is that there is part of him that still survives, correct?’

Over twenty-five years later and here they were, back here again.

‘No one's every really gone, Senator-’

‘Spare me the platitudes, _General_. You know I am referring here specifically to his descendants.’

He had the audacity to smirk at her, the prick ~ _got 'cha_ ~ and she wished a moment for her blaster as he barrels on without waiting from her to respond.

‘We need to know if any survived, obviously, and, should that be the case, we need to know why they aren’t here to answer the questions of this Tribunal.’

Leia caught her breath.

_Over my cold, dead body._

‘Your jurisdiction extends that far, Senator? If so, it’s a surprise to me.’

She had him and he knew it; she’d written the peace treaty. He waves it off, tries a different tack.

‘So you can’t speak to their role, in Palpatine’s plans?’

‘I really couldn’t say, Senator-'

‘Couldn’t? Or wouldn’t?’

_From a certain point of view._

‘Couldn’t.’

He stared at her in frustration, this man she’d once hoped would be an ally, thought might even one day grow to be a friend, and she keeps her face as neutral and as calm as ever.

_Don’t play with me, child. I’ve much more experience with this game than you do._

She hadn’t held her own in the Senate all those years for nothing. Hadn’t risen, twice, to the heights of the Resistance without the ability to hold her own against those who used silence to pressure their opponents.

It had been a steep learning curve for her, all those years ago, after she’d first been inaugurated into the Senate - the old one, the one that represented the final dregs of the High Republic.

She'd been too impulsive, too angry - traits she’d apparently passed down - and too impatient - with the incompetence of her colleagues, who had been too willing to both ignore the dangers in front of them and at the same time too quick to cut off their noses to spite their faces.

Ironically, it had been her time with the reformed Senate after the defeat of the Empire - incomplete, as it had turned out - to learn patience, to learn how to manage coalitions and how to build institutions.

She may have learned leadership and strategy through her time with the Resistance, but she’d gained her experience with alliance-building and logistics in the Senate.

As promised to her son and her husband, she’d walked away from that career, years ago, to focus on her son’s emotional health, but she’d followed galactic developments closely, even from the outside looking in.

Had kept an eye on the growth of the First Order, had tried to sound the alarm.

As much good as it has done.

They’d hunted her, hunted her son even more, so they’d hid, her small family keeping safe in unexpected places and in plain sight, depending. With old contacts and new friends. They’d done their best in the meantime, her and Han, to bring their son up, give him an idea of the places they’d been and the responsibilities they’d tried to shoulder.

It was only when she’d lost Ben - snatched from some obscure trading post the locals called Jakku - that she questioned it, her path, her decisions, regarding both those made on the long-away day on Coruscant and ever since.

_‘Maybe it would have been better,’ she’d told her husband, as he held her firmly - refusing to let her go, ‘if he had gone to train with Luke. Maybe then he could have used his power to fight-’_

_‘More than one way to fight, sweetheart,’ he’d reassured her, his eyes wet ‘you taught me that, remember? We’ll find him. We’ll get him back. We always do, remember?’_

She’d buried her head in his chest of her tall, unpredictable, loving, frustrating, impossible husband, still sturdy enough and tough enough and loving enough to be strong for her when she couldn’t be strong for herself, and let her eyes burn with the pressure of unshed tears.

They had found him, after all, or rather, Ben had appeared, on their holonet, almost a year after his disappearance.

In the hands of the Sith.

Bound in ropes and Force dampeners and held at the command of Sheev Palpatine, thought long dead, who preened in the glory of his triumph. The footage showed Ben forced to kneel at the foot of Palpatine's throne, as the ~late~ Emperor had announced his ~miraculous~ return.

Her and Han had had to watch, spellbound, caught between relief and despair, as their son knelt, vulnerable, while Palpatine's cultists roared their approval, the First Order fleet prepared to take down the Republic and the legendary Master of the Knights of Ren stood at her Emperor’s side.

The offspring of one of his clones, apparently, from the way she bowed her head deferentially and answered every cloying command with a soft murmur of ‘yes, grandfather,’; she was tall, this slim girl, and younger than she should be, her eyes seemingly wiped clean of all emotion.

Dressed all in black; boots, arm wraps, tunic, flowing cloak and all, she kept her eyes downcast as she stood, quiet and attentive, still in body and soul, despite all the tumult surrounding her.

Stood still, as a galaxy away, Leia screams at the holonet and never takes one eye off her beloved son. 

Looking at the young sith that day, even with the distance and the delay resulting from the holonet, Leia knew, suddenly, what Ben had gone looking for on that godsfaken planet out on the Outer Rim.

_‘Have to tough as nails, to survive that hell-hole,’ Han said softly, more to himself, more a whisper than anything else, when Ben told them his destination._

Otherwise, he'd kept his mouth shut, just as she had, as Ben told them of a strange bond, of a feeling on the other side calling him, desperately, to Jakku. When he'd told them of the sense of someone lost. When he'd told them, that he had a sense of someone who’d waited as long as they could.

When he'd told them that he had a sense of someone who'd spent their life waiting, and then could wait no longer.

Told them.

Of possibilities that might yet return.

He couldn’t do it any longer, Ben had told them, could no longer ignore what the Force was telling him, _screaming_ at him, to do, and he’d headed to Jakku that afternoon, landing at Niima Outpost, alone, taking with him little more, apparently, than his wits and a blaster.

It had been the last they’d heard of him, there’d not been a single whisper of him since, this past year and they’d suffered, as they waited, hoping to find him again.

Hoping he might yet return.

Until that moment, as they watched by holonet as their son's face appeared.

Watched as this lithe young woman - Rey - walked towards him, as he kneels, a supplicant at her feet, in front of the Sith throne, while she advances with a lit lightsaber in her hand, the red blade hissing with menace, throwing crimson light and crimson sparks.

He watches calmly, but Leia knows her son.

As his eyes burn with entreaty looking up at Rey's, which are unyielding and fierce, Leia can do nothing but watch, helpless.

He looked exhausted, wore the same clothes they’d last seen him in - his father’s worn brown leather jacket still showing its worth - though he appears unhurt.

Still, the exhaustion was there, and the mental strain, in the bags under his eyes and in the extreme protrusion of his cheekbones.

Whoever had had him that last year, they may have taken care of him, physically, at least somewhat, but they hadn’t spared him, and they hadn’t been kind.

The feed cut out too soon, though not until after the Galaxy saw Palpatine collapse dead on his throne, Anakin Skywalker’s old lightsaber - once Luke Skywalker’s prized possession - having answered the Emperor’s granddaughter’s command by slicing the old wizard in half.

The last image Leia, and Han, and everyone else, saw was her son rising to take his place at the side of the Empire’s heir, turning with her so that they were back to back, their lightsabers each lit, as they faced off, outnumbered four to one, as the Praetorian guard charged.

Developments happened fast, after that; the First Order fleet devastated by a stormtrooper rebellion - apparently encouraged from inside the First Order leadership over the last year - as the Resistance seizing its moment, throwing everything they had, ever reserve, into the attack.

The conflict had ended in an uneasy truce between those imperial loyalists who remained and the allied opposition forces.

Leia had written the ceasefire agreement and the peace treaty which had followed.

She was -

\- cautiously optimistic.

It wasn’t perfect and it wasn’t entirely peaceful, this peace, but Leia had hope, for the future. As she reminds herself, often now - _as with the sun, you can have hope even when the light is dim._

There were problems.

As expected.

The Empire’s forces thought they were stronger than they were and some - General Armitage Hux, for one - tried to act as though they were still unchallenged in their mastery of the Core Worlds.

The Resistance high command was overconfident at times, and impetuous - as seen with Poe’s hasty actions in convening a war crimes tribunal to seek out Palpatine's descendants - pushing where she would have held firm and giving in where she would have slammed through the wall.

Still, she knew, as they did, that this was this generation’s fight. Though she’d always be there to provide counsel and support, she’d no interest in re-litigating her generation’s mistakes. It was time for them to forge a new order for the galaxy, with new mistakes and glorious achievements.

She'd be there to cheer them on.

For today, though, she was finally free, after a long day that had ended a long week of dreary council meetings and the grilling by Poe’s tribunal, so she headed off to find her heart, left safe at home as she went about her day.

She hears them before she sees them; clambering on Han and Chewie, using them as climbing frames when they see her walk in the door. Then they’re running, running, running at her, these pale spectres of her heart, and she’s catching them, one in each arm.

Less than four-years-old - this next generation of her family - they’re twins, as were her and Luke, though she hopes they are able to grow up peacefully, and with each other in the way she and her brother never had the chance to.

He’s with the Force now, having stood in the way of the Emperor as he’d come to claim his 'legacy' granddaughter, as Rey had told her her grandfather had referred to her during that confrontation with Luke, one fateful morning on Jakku.

Leia can't help but miss her brother; she mourns him daily.

She knows he’s watching, though, as she wraps her arms around Moonbeam and Glimmer, her nicknames for these 'Palpatine' descendants; small beings with warm hearts and soul-destroying eyes who also happen to be _her_ grandchildren, the latest of the Skywalker-Solo lines.

It is her determination, her 'legacy', that will ensure that they’re not seen as 'legacy' children. That they won't have the label thrust upon them. Just as her son had been more than the grandson of Darth Vader and more than the nephew of Luke Skywalker. Just as he’d been more than the son of Leia Organa and Han Solo. Been more than just the legacy of his namesake; Obi-Wan Kenobi, a man he'd never met.

Her son's children are _his_ children, but they are more than just the children of the Last Jedi and the Empress of the Sith. More than the ultimate fruit of the Palpatine line; more than the ultimate fruit of the Skywalker line. Or the Organa line, or the Amidala line. Or the Solo line. they are not vessels. They’re children, and people, in of themselves, and she loves them as such, with every inch of her body, as does the remainder of their family.

Looking up, as his son walks over to rescue her from the exuberance of his progeny, his arm wrapped tightly around his wife’s waist - they are never far from each other, these days, her Ben and Rey - she smiles reassuringly.

The Galaxy might one day see these small children as the 'Last Palpatines'; as they’d once seen Ben as the 'Last Skywalker'. They, their family, would protect these children from that; teach them to forge their own path. They had each other, they had their family, in all that entailed. They’d be okay.

Distracted, as they tug at her robes she smiles down at her precocious ones as they tug her towards the shed outside as they talk over each other.

‘Found it, Gramma, you have-’

‘Wait and see, Gramma -’

Her husband has preceded them and he’s there to hug her as the twins let her go, wrapping her in his tall frame, only slightly bowed, kissing her softly on the forehead even as she curses him, mentally, a little, for how he’s still so handsome, how he still moves her heart with his fluffy hair - now mostly white - and crooked grin.

Curses him a little; as he knows exactly, his effect on her.

Always has.

‘Nurfherder.’

‘Your worshipfulness.’

The kids are impatient though, pulling her forward to look at the droid they’d apparently found that afternoon, stashed away in and forgotten.

The blue is a little more dull than she remembers, the silver a little more tarnished, but he’s still the same, her old friend. She grieves again, remembering how he’d gone silent the day Luke had died.

Squatting slightly, despite the way her knees creak, she leans in to lay a gentle hand on his domed head, completely unprepared for how it kickstarts his programming; as he spits out a long-forgotten recording.

She’d almost forgotten how tiny she was. She’d almost forgotten how young she was; the future of the Rebellion, her Senate duties weighing equally on her shoulders.

Almost forgotten how desperate she was, in that moment, so sure it was all for naught.

_‘-my ship has fallen under attack, and I'm afraid my mission to bring you to Alderaan has failed-’_

Beside her, as Han wraps a sturdy supporting arm around her, her grandchildren have gone silent, staring in awe.

Their little mouths fall open in shock as the ancient recording plays.

Before -

‘Is that really you, Gramma?’

‘That’s not you, is it Gramma?’

Her husband interjects quietly, his eyes soft.

‘That’s her, kids, trust me.’

_‘my only hope-’_

Her tall, sweet, intense son looks over from where he stands, equally as sturdy as her husband, at the entrance of the shed.

If anything, his arm is wrapped tighter around his wife's waist than Han's is around hers as Rey alternates smiling up at her husband and over at her small children.

He meets her eyes with his, her precious son.

Smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> And they lived happily ever after!
> 
> Though remind me next time, gentle readers, to just make it a one-shot instead of a 55 part twitfic. Clearly was not thinking. 
> 
> Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this. I realized after I posted it that I actually wrote a (VERY loose) prequel series to my earlier work 'The Empress and Her Dragon,' in case you wanted to check that out. https://archiveofourown.org/works/26429359
> 
> In the meantime, hopefully, 2021 treats you well and overcomes the disaster that was this past week.


End file.
